Facebook’s ‘Like’ Button Will Now Include Six New Emotions

A few months ago, we told you about Facebook‘s plans to revamp the ‘Like’ button, mainly due to wanting users to be able to show empathy to people on their news feeds when they share unfortunate information. If you thought the social network was just going to add a ‘Dislike’ button, we’ve got more news for you.

The ‘Like’ button will still show up on every post and if you tap and hold on to it or hover over it (if you’re on desktop), it will reveal the other emotions which you can select. Posts will now show the total Reaction count and icons of the most popular Reactions. You can also tap the Reaction count and see who felt what.

The hope for the new ‘Sad’ button is people will be able to express their condolences, sympathy and empathy in a way where it doesn’t feel generic. We all know social media is mainly people’s highlight reels, but now maybe people will open up more.

The Reactions will allow Facebook to show us more of what we connect with on our news feeds.

“If someone uses a Reaction, we will infer they want to see more of that type of post. In the beginning, it won’t matter if someone likes, “wows” or “sads” a post. Over time, we hope to learn how the different Reactions should be weighted differently by News Feed to do a better job of showing everyone the stories they most want to see,” wrote Facebook on their Newsroom blog.

The company came up with these six emotions by looking at the most frequently used one-word comments (which is “lol”) and stickers used on News Feed posts, grouped them together and discovered they were the way every person felt despite their culture.